A Jam Jar Full of the Right Stuff

 August 19, 2025
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Keep my anger from becoming meanness. 
Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity.
Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking.
Keep my anger turned toward justice, not cruelty.
Remind me that all of this, every bit of it, is for love. 
Keep me fiercely kind. 

~ Laura Jean Truman

Beloved:
          Keep me fiercely kind is yet another on the list of tattoos I’d get if I were to get one.  On my forearm, so I’d see it all day every day.  Not that it would help so much – since the far greater portion of my unkindness is not in deeds but thoughts.  Unkind thoughts.  A notebook’s worth a day at least.
          The progress I have made in thirty years would not fill a jam jar, so I’ve no advice to share save a couple of very tiny observations.

• Kindness toward others and myself in my thoughts is the most tedious spiritual practice of all, and the most easily neglected, and yet it can be done, inch by inch, over a lifetime.
• Humble service toward someone is a good way for me to think more kindly of them.  Simply trying to control my own thoughts never works – but relationships do.  Knowing someone does.  Knowing people breaks down assumptions and fosters connection.  Connection breeds empathy, and empathy is where fierce kindness is conceived.

          A very tiny jam jar, don’t you know?  But full of the right stuff all the same.  The stuff that can change a life . . . mine, the one in pursuit of fierce kindness, the life I believe Jesus offers me and you and anyone with the courage to confront the tedium of the practice.  This new creation business* is not for slackers.  It’s work, unsupervised work – with no finish line and no medals on a dais.  But the rewards – oh the rewards of even a spoonful of fierce kindness – on such sweetness a life will go on and on. 
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~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

* Colossians 3:5-12 * Ephesians 4:21-25 * 2 Corinthians 5:17